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It would be hard to pay homage to Vincent Van Gogh with more fervor or devotion than filmmakers Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman bring to Loving Vincent, in which they've not only created thousands of new oil paintings in his style, but also made him the subject of a murder-mystery.

Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the influential Foreign Relations Committee, will not seek re-election in 2018.

He is the first senator to announce retirement plans ahead of next year's election cycle.

"I also believe the most important public service I have to offer our country could well occur over the next 15 months," Corker said in a statement, "and I want to be able to do that as thoughtfully and independently as I did the first 10 years and nine months of my Senate career."

NPR's Robert Siegel talks with Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, author of the book, Being Mortal, and a staff writer for The New Yorker, about whether health care is a right. Gawande visited his hometown of Athens, Ohio, to find responses to this question are divided.

Roughly a month after the Brazilian government said it would open a wide swath of Amazon rain forest to mining interests, it has backpedaled on that controversial decision. In a statement Monday, the country's Ministry of Mines and Energy said President Michel Temer would issue a new decree restoring the original conditions of the nature reserve.

Hurricane Maria left destruction throughout Puerto Rico when it slammed the island last week. It also tore down most of the communications infrastructure that connects the U.S. territory with the rest of the world, including the millions of Puerto Ricans living on the mainland.

The battle to fill the Senate seat left vacant by Jeff Sessions has become a battleground for different wings of the Republican party. Roy Moore and incumbent Sen. Luther Strange face each other in a primary runoff election Tuesday, but many in the party see it as a contest between the establishment and a more fiery populist branch.

Last month, Hurricane Harvey brought unprecedented flooding to the Houston area. More than two weeks ago, Hurricane Irma hit Florida as a remarkably massive and long-lasting storm.

Those storms have long since dissipated. Now much of the focus has shifted to Hurricane Maria, which remains an active storm — a storm that caused devastation in Puerto Rico, which is still reeling from the immediate impact.

So many great writers have given us so many great quotes in an attempt to capture New York, but I think my favorite is by the legendary New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling: "Before it was anything else," Liebling says, "New York was a seaport, and before anything else, it still is."

Jennifer Egan clearly shares Liebling's view in her latest novel, Manhattan Beach. Egan is known for the edgy tone of her work and for her fragmented storylines that require some self-assembly by readers.

My wife was the love of my life. We were together for a dozen years. And then, in 2013, it was over. I was 32 and bipolar, and divorce felt like the end of the world. I was so depressed, I was hospitalized.

Friends told me I needed time away to begin to heal. They helped me move to Dubai, where I could be with family. But weeks passed and I hardly recovered. I was no longer suicidal, it's true. But I didn't really care if I was alive, either.

It might surprise you that Australia doesn't already have a space agency.

The country has been involved in the space field for decades — in 1967, it was among the first countries to launch a satellite. Two years later, a NASA tracking station in Australia received and transmitted the first TV images of Neil Armstrong taking the first steps on the Moon.

Every year as August draws to a close and Labor Day approaches, I start craving muscadines, the large, thick-skinned grapes that were everywhere in my home state of North Carolina when I was growing up.

Many summer evenings, my friends and I would sit on one of our porches and plot out how we could get into a neighbor's yard to get the muscadines off the vine and into our mouths. We crafted football-like plays that involved a bunch of running, splitting up, grape snatching and fence jumping.

Federal agents have arrested former NBA star Chuck Person and several other college basketball coaches, in a bribery and fraud case that also involves sports management agents and a top executive at Adidas. In all, 10 people were arrested.

This repertoire of kids menu items may seem familiar to many families, but one fast-casual chain aims to put a lot more options in front of its young customers.

Beginning this month, there's a kid-sized version of almost everything on Panera's regular menu. The portion shrinks, as does the price. "Kids now have the choice of 250 different combinations," Panera CEO Ron Shaich told NPR.

Much-needed supplies are either in Puerto Rico or on the way, officials say, but the island's governor acknowledges that they can't deliver fuel and other material quickly enough. Frustrated residents face long lines for fuel, as millions of people have gone nearly a week without power.

"We need resources and security. We need a quicker logistical deployment," Gov. Ricardo Rossello told NPR's Mary Louise Kelly on Tuesday. "You know, the gas and fuel issue is not a matter of how much do we have — it's a matter of how we can distribute it."

The widow of Pat Tillman — the NFL player-turned U.S. Army Ranger killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004 — is pushing back against a retweet by President Trump that included an image of her late husband with the hashtags #StandForOurAnthem and #BoycottNFL.

Concussions have gotten a lot of attention in recent years, especially as professional football players' brains have shown signs of degenerative brain disease linked with repeated blows to the head. Now, a new analysis confirms what many doctors fear — that concussions start showing up at a high rate in teens who are active in contact sports.

Here is one thing author Robert Wright and I agree on when it comes to Buddhist meditation: It's really, really boring.

At least, it's boring in the beginning. But there's another thing we agree on, too. That initial meditative boredom is actually a door. It's an opening that can lead us to something essential, and essentially true, that Buddhism has to teach us about being human.